Customer relationship management is one of those subjects that changes more often than it keeps still. The introduction of CRM happened way back in the 1980s, when databases were just starting to make the rounds in the corporate world.
Back then, businesses would adapt their database marketing model by sending out direct mail brochures and performing outbound sales calls, but by the end of the 1980s, the birth of the ACT – the very first contact management software – made it possible for industries to track customer and prospect details all in a digital space.
In some ways, it was clear where it was all headed; in others, the marketing and sales execs of the 80s couldn’t have dreamed of the level of insight and details we could extract from a CRM in 2023.
These days, very few salespeople can do without a CRM to track every phone call, email, or chat between the business and a promising lead as it moves through the funnel. Monitoring those points-of-contact is key to ensuring a slick, organized, and professional approach to lead nurturing, and a more productive day’s work for sales reps and account managers.
But a CRM used in isolation is still limiting. While, once, it was capable of ‘covering all your bases’ when it came to monitoring points of contact with customers, these days so much of what we do when nurturing leads takes place on social media. Or, maybe more aptly, social media accounts for so much of what we should be doing when it comes to generating and converting high-quality leads.
Social media management should never exist in a bubble, and your community management and social listening tools have more than one purpose. It’s a core part of so many other aspects of the customer experience, and the right integrations can prove transformative not just to time and productivity, but capital-R Results too.
Here’s what you should know about social media customer relationship management.
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The Power of a Strong CRM
The right CRM can be the spark that gets the fire going – that much has been key throughout the long history of CRM. For new, fledgling businesses, organizing communications within a program specifically designed to streamline the customer experience marks a key moment in their history – a fresh, new competitive edge honed to a sharp point can be just what they need to start fighting for key accounts.
A CRM that suits your business’s needs will lead to…
- Higher customer satisfaction
- Stronger customer relationships thanks to better social customer care
- Better understanding of customers and leads
- More meaningful interactions
- A higher retention rate
- Increased sales
- Space for a more collaborative approach
A CRM really is an essential program for modern businesses.
The Power of a Strong Social Media Marketing Platform
When you make the decision to orient your marketing efforts toward social media, one of the first hurdles you’ll come across – and definitively the biggest – is that it’s a never-ending feast.
There’s a reason why so many businesses are utilizing the social media space, and even more reasons why 90% of consumers buy from brands they follow on the platforms. Social media offers everything from visibility, brand monitoring, customer connections, dialogue, lead generation, the list just goes on and on.
But not every business knows how to do it. Because the social media world is ever-changing, businesses need definitive ways to stay ahead of the new trends and formulate a consistent strategy. This is done with social media management tools. Without these tools, even just maintaining your social media strategy is a mammoth task…let alone scaling it and utilizing all the insights it yields.
A social media marketing platform centralizes all the (once) disparate tasks involved in social publishing and community management, and introduces just the right amount of AI assistance that you can automate the more repetitive, time-consuming parts of social media management and enable your marketing team to focus on what demands more in terms of skill, creativity, and expertise.
A social media management platform is ultimately concerned with the customer experience. Why? Because, these days, so much of what we do takes place on social media that these channels often represent the best and most convenient way to reach customers and leads. The more you can streamline your social media marketing, the better you can make the customer experience.
The right social media management platform will…
- Streamline the ongoing processes of content creation and social posting, enabling your team to pre-schedule and approve content and ensure a consistent approach to content publishing.
- Equip marketers with social monitoring and listening tools to ensure real-time awareness of any trends, relevant customer or competitor insights, keyword usage, or market shifts. It will also underscore why social listening is important, and the best practices for extracting the most valuable information from your audience.
- Automate analytics, and regularly publish them in ready-to-present formats that clearly demonstrate ROI.
- Centralize community management, ensuring you can maintain a strong, constant presence across multiple social channels without wasting time switching between networks.
- Equip you with the right tools for content creation and repurposing, utilizing the latest AI to assist your team and avoid them from being overwhelmed by keeping up with the demands of the day.
- Create a simple, user-friendly platform for your employee-advocacy program – something that simplifies the process, and makes it possible for team members to post consistently without pulling their attention away from core business.
- Keep your data safe and secure, so that social media marketing doesn’t represent a weakness in the system.
- Empower your team to scale B2B social media operations, move more leads into the funnel, and boost communication between sales and marketing.
The Benefits of Integration
That communication between sales and marketing is precisely what motivates businesses to integrate CRM and social media management together. The insights that marketers can generate on social media can (and will) be pivotal to your sales agents’ approach to new leads and existing customers, just as the information generated through your CRM should be informing your marketers’ approach to social media.
Here’s what integration between these two separate platforms will mean for the business:
- More effective customer relationship management
By now, if you have any amount of social media presence to speak of, there’s a strong chance that many of your direct interactions with customers and leads will occur on social media.
If your CRM is limited to direct channels like phone conversations, emails, and live chats, then there’s a good chance it’s missing a few key pieces of the puzzle – the DMs, comments, tags, and other interactions that take place through your social channels.
Integrating your social media and CRM means that all those valuable pieces are kept together, and you can keep a clearer record of your interactions with every customer and lead. Combine that with insights from your social listening platform, and this cuts down on repetition, avoids any awkward moments when customers have to restate an issue or requirement. Ultimately, this makes for…
- A more streamlined, positive customer experience
There are so many channels through which leads can find and reach out to you. Some will do it the old-fashioned way – click through to your website from an ad or social post and fill out a contact form that clearly states what they need from you – while others may reach out via the comment section of a recent Facebook post, or through a tag on Twitter.
To put your best foot forward, you’ve got to be able to give every customer the same cohesive, smooth, professional experience – and the only way you can ensure that is through social media and CRM integrations.
- More robust customer understanding
Data is everything. You know that already, and you’ve heard it stated and restated to you more times than you can count. You’ve got a lot of data, and you use a lot of data…but how much data is free flowing between different departments? Could your sales and marketing teams be sharing more insights to create one single, unified understanding of your customers?
Social media marketers have their finger on the pulse of customer interests and requirements. Provided they understand how social listening benefits and feeds into the work they’re doing to publish and interact with audiences, they’re always in the right place at the right time to know what’s capturing customers’ attention – any pain-points, market trends or changes, issues with competitors or, alternatively, positive experiences with you. This insight is just as important to your sales team as it is your marketing team.
Better customer relationship management and understanding will lead to a more streamlined, positive customer experience – a streamlined, positive customer experience will lead to a stronger bottom line.
Without a doubt, integrating your CRM with social media will improve your sales funnel, helping you to identify all of the highest value leads and nurture them into repeat customers. The visibility of social media will also help you to identify the prospects who have shown interest in your brand in real time, allowing you to engage with them on a more individualized level.
It is crucial to adapt to the times and do everything you can to integrate various technologies for customer care, social media monitoring and listening, and community management for the company’s benefit. To gain insights into customers, their behavior, increase brand awareness and streamline your customer service process, integration of CRM and social media must be brought together to form a whole – helping to drive your business into new territories.
